Brand & user experience designer @ OddBird since
Sondra (she/her) is a brand and user experience/interface designer – as well as a marketing expert, usability tester, and object-oriented UX strategist.
Sondra spearheads our design process through brand development, user experience design, and usability testing. She has been creating custom brands and integrated web graphics for over 17 years. She has lead the marketing teams for a variety of small businesses, and acted as co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of a personal care products manufacturing startup where she coordinated multiple crowdfunding campaigns that reached over 200% of their goal. Sondra is also a multimedia artist, author, and musician – bringing a unique perspective to audience engagement and interaction.
In 2020, Sondra became a certified object-oriented UX strategist. To learn more about how the OOUX process might benefit your web project, checkout our Research & Concepting service.
Color contrast checker with Oklch, Oklab, P3, and more
OddContrast is a color format converter, featuring newer color formats like Oklch, Oklab, and the Display P3 color space. It’s also a color contrast checker to help designers meet WCAG 2 accessibility standards.
Popover, CSS Anchor Positioning, Cascade Layers
Along with our work for the W3C developing specifications for the CSS language, OddBird has started and maintains a number of powerful polyfills for new web platform features including the Popover attribute, CSS Anchor Positioning, and Cascade Layers.
Automated style guides
Design systems streamline development, communication, and consistency – but often rely on dedicated teams and extended budgets. We wanted a tool that helps create and maintain living style guides & pattern libraries in an agile process, and on a budget. Herman helps you keep your development process simple – and your UX consistent – as you scale over time.
Integrated design-system management in Sass
OddBird’s Accoutrement tools help keep design tokens meaningful to both humans and machines – opening the door for automation, while improving readability. These tools also integrate with Herman, our automated pattern-library generator.
For simple interactive sites, using a proxy to manage your state and side effects may be enough.
An object map is a place to document information about objects in your digital system, keeping everyone involved on the same page. During our conversation, we walk through examples and discuss the benefits of using object maps.
Do you want to make your website or web app more intuitive for the people who visit? If so, I’d like to introduce you to the world of Object-Oriented UX. As a UX designer at OddBird, using OOUX strategies to identify and avoid unintuitive objects has been key to our design process. A warning, though, before you continue: once you start seeing unintuitive objects, you won’t be able to unsee them!
Part 3 – Responsive Web App vs Native Mobile App vs Progressive Web App
If you’re weighing the performance optimization and device integration opportunities of a native mobile app against the broad reach and lower cost of a responsive web app – and can’t decide which is a higher priority for your digital product – don’t despair. A progressive web app may be just…
During our conversation we look at 3 examples of unintuitive web design, and learn how to create websites and apps that are more intuitive using object-oriented user experience (OOUX) design strategies.
During our conversation, we discuss what htmx is, how it improves user experience, and walk through some examples of common UI patterns using htmx.
Part 2 – Responsive Web App vs Native Mobile App vs Progressive Web App
If you have an idea for a digital product, you may be wondering if you should build a responsive web app, a native mobile app, or a progressive web app. Is one option inherently better? What are the pros and cons? This is part 2 of a three-part series unpacking…
Part 1 – Responsive Web App vs Native Mobile App vs Progressive Web App
The decision of what platform to use to build your app is quite important – affecting project scope, timeline, and budget. But understanding the differences between a responsive web app, a native mobile app, and a progressive web app – and deciding which one is right for your project …
Sondra and Miriam chat with Sophia about using her ORCA methodology (Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes) in OddBird’s work with clients. We dive into the ways OOUX facilitates a flow of conversation between designers and back-end developers, and get a sneak peak of Miriam’s work on the new container query features coming to CSS.
8 CSS & UX things I learned at GenerateConf 2019
As my first foray into the world of web design conferences, GenerateConf 2019 in New York did not disappoint. From human-centered AI to Object Oriented UX to the wonder of CSS Grid, here’s what I found interesting.
Are you a startup founder looking to develop a new web app, or a company interested in expanding your web services? Here’s your chance to ask all those questions that keep you up at night.
Four useful tools & tutorials
So you’d like to start learning design, but the number of tools and tutorials available is overwhelming. Where do you start? I recommend Paper for sketching out UX ideas, Practical Color Theory for Coders to generate color palettes and learn color theory, Choosing the Right Font: A Practical Guide to…
from Natalya Shelburne
If you write code and you want to delve into design, Natalya Shelburne’s Practical Color Theory for Coders will get you up and running with a beautiful, cohesive, and accessible color palette using Sass color functions, and teach you why her palettes work so well, all at the same time.
If you’d like to learn how to create parallax scrolling for your website, Paul Lewis’ guide to performant parallaxing is the perfect place to start.
How do you select a set of colors that express the attitude of your brand, look great together, and pass WCAG accessibility standards? How many colors is too many? This step-by-step guide outlines OddBird’s process for tackling these challenges.
It’s important to define your brand goals first and review them throughout the process. Next, do some research for inspiration. What colors are the other companies in your field using? Use Paletton to generate a cohesive color palette. Test color contrast to ensure accessibility. Finally, create prototypes to make sure you colors work well in context.
How do you choose the best fonts for a brand identity among the thousands of options available on the interwebs these days? Whether you’re starting from scratch or rebranding like us, this step-by-step guide can help focus and direct your process. First, define your brand goals. Next, explore your options…
What follows is an in-depth look at our brand design process thus far as we work towards a new look and feel for this, our OddSite. Details. Confessions. What worked. What flopped. And why.
OddBird met for a work retreat in April. On the Oddgenda: grow the company, and redesign OddSite. I came home from retreat tasked with reviewing OddBird’s eb presence, and proposing ways to improve communication about our process and services in order to attract new clients.